[jsnell]

There's no business in straight-up news aggregation. Google News is purely a public service (it isn't monetized) and a liability (see the regular attempts by governments to make Google pay for news). Anybody with any kind of business in that space is running much more of a social network / discussion / gamification angle.

There's a bunch of tiny Google products like that. Google Reader is a good example of this -- the reason the shutdown didn't lead to a cambrian explosion of RSS readers is that there wasn't a business to be had there, even a small one. The new AI-first Google Finance UX makes me really sad, but it's 100% certain that nobody else will be signing up to run a clean, free, adless finance site. Books, Scholar, Patents are probably under a lot of pressure, and if they close, don't expect anyone else to pick up those golden opportunities.

Edit: Ok, reading throught the rest of the comments, it looks like the article was written by a muppet and not actually about Google News despite the title saying "Google News". But I guess the above still stands. The golden opportunities aren't there.